Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Sam Mendes | Skyfall

alternative bonds

by Douglas Messerli

Neal
Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan (screenplay, based on characters by Ian
Fleming), Sam Mendes (screenplay) Skyfall
/ 2012

Changing
my usual pattern when speaking of the movie I have just seen, I am going to try
to resist telling most details of the plot. Of course, in any James Bond movie
plot is important in that the vicarious vicissitudes of the spy’s exciting
adventures is at the heart of any episode. Given the complete diffidence of the
early figures—particularly Sean Connery, but even Roger Moore and Pierce
Brosnan—who portrayed Bond as a suavely sexual, testosterone-filled male, who,
in the service of Her Majesty’s Kingdom—were basically invulnerable as they
drank, gambled, and sexually enchanted every woman they met, be she friend or
enemy—however, I don’t believe plot was ever essential in these Ian
Fleming-based fables. The Bond image, established by Connery, was an impervious
penis, who plotted, gunned-down, and wittily dismissed the numerous evil
villains out to destroy him, with a penetrating glance, along with any other
tools with which Q might have provided him. Despite all the manically
devastating tortures that might face him, there was no fear that 007 would not come
through, his thinly tuxedo-wrapped body intact, with yet another girl on his
arm or, more explicitly, impaled under his hirsute chest.

In the remake of Casino Royale and Quantum of
Solace (a movie, I must admit, I never saw) Daniel Craig as Bond, changed
everything. Both of these films made the Bond image over, without particularly
emphasizing it, into a more vulnerable, certainly less heroic figure, without
sacrificing the heroic events and womanizing of the original—at least
superficially. Somehow, even in those first two films with Craig, it wasn’t
just vulnerability that defined his character, but a willingness to explore
terrains Connery could never have thought of. Craig, for the first time, made
Bond feel less like a cartoon figure than a real human being, a troubled,
sometimes confused, almost existentialist hero who, despite his smaller
physique and, at times, even grizzly appearance, had all the pluck of the
former Bonds without their absolute athletic abilities. Craig as James Bond was
a kind of remarkable everyman, and even without all that beautiful body hair
and rippling abs and the polished Scottish accent, was far sexier in his bodily
clinging suits than the patriarchal debonair Connery or pretty boys Moore and
Brosnan (although Brosnan has since revealed himself as a far more capable
chameleon who might almost have been able to make the same transition that
Craig has achieved).

While the previous two films merely hinted at
the radical shifts of the Bond figure, Mendes’ Skyfall takes the whole Bond transformation on as its very subject,
analyzing it from the shift from the cold war spy tactics to the inevitable
alteration of world politics, where the evil forces are no longer moles, with
their molls and evil overseers from opposing countries and political forces,
but are now figures of shadowy world, where the villains are never who you
might expect them to be—and, accordingly, far more dangerous and
unpredictable.

Raul Silva (Tiago Rodriguez) (played by
the powerful actor Javier Barden) is just such a figure, a former member of the
British Secret Service, one of M’s favorite operatives, who has gone rogue when
she abandoned him to the Chinese, who painfully tortured him. Even then, as we
learn, he refused to give up information, ultimately using the cyanide pill
embedded in his tooth to relieve his suffering—and release him from his
discovery that M (the always admirable Judi Dench) has betrayed him. Unlike all
the villains of past Bond adventures, Silva’s goal is not world domination,
money, gold, or any worldly possessions—just simple vengeance, and,
accordingly, he is the most dangerous villain of any Bond adventure to date.
Just as in the Coen brothers’ No Country
for Old Men, Bardem takes evil to new levels; he is unstoppable, determined
to track down his enemies and all their associates with a ploddingly mad insistency.

Early on in this somewhat long fable,
Bond is revealed, as is M, to be outdated—both mentally and physically—figures
who have outlived their value to the system which they have served. M refuses
to abandon her position even though under her watch, and through Bond’s
effectiveness, they have allowed files listing the major spies embedded in
international terrorist organizations to be stolen and utterly compromised.
Indeed, their encrypted computer systems have been high-jacked, we soon learn
by an international terrorist (Silva), one of their own. Early in the film Bond
is shot and is presumed dead, the results of which have great significance of
his possible continuance. When he, “resurrected,” as he puts, it returns, he
fails all his tests; but M, mysteriously if predictably, protects him, allowing
him to remain in his position despite her—and everyone else’s—serious doubts. In
short, Craig as Bond is as different from Connery (Moore or Brosnan) as you can
get. He can’t even shoot, let alone lure any woman to him with great success.
His brief affair with Sévérine (Béréice Marlohe), a woman saved from the Macau
sex trade by Silva, ends in her death—perhaps not that different from the
endings of several previous “Bond women,” but sadder this time, simply because
Bond is totally unable to save her from Silva’s determined murder through a
perverse enactment of the William Tell myth, with, instead of an apple upon her
head, a glass of Bond’s favorite whiskey as the target. Craig’s Bond, as might
be expected, misses the target, shooting high, while the villain purposely does
in the beauty.

In short, instead of reiterating the Bond
franchise, this special 50-year version, the 23rd or 25th
Bond film (depending upon whether one includes the early spoof, Casino Royale and the unofficial Never Say Never) utterly redefines the
central and subluminary characters as both the story and figures of
contemporary British politics openly debate their relevance and necessity
within the culture at large. It’s a brilliant device that allows the Bond
franchise both to link the new world, represented by Craig, to its past and to
disassociate itself from Connery and other impersonators of that role. This movie
wants it both ways—and gets it.

On the one hand, Skyfall pulls out the stops to connect the Craig version with the
Connery one—if only the audience might imagine a taller, more hirsute, more
dapper figure having fallen through age into a slightly smaller, less handsome,
but determinedly energetic other self. Connery’s links with Scotland,
particularly in this film through the last dark scene in Bond’s childhood home,
Skyfall, are retained. His long-term connection with M (as Judi Dench) has been
brought forward from previous movies. Throughout the film, Mendes goes out of
his way to reference several of the previous Bond films, subtly employing the
memorable Bond themes, this time in low orchestral rumblings, spectacularly
referencing Bond’s always international travels (some of the best scenes of
this film were shot in the neon-lit Shanghai cityscape and in a recreated Macau
backdrop), and, for the sixth Bond film, bringing back Connery’s silver-birch
Aston Martin D85 car.Even Miss
Moneypenny, this time a beautiful and sexy Black woman, Eve (Naomie Harris) who
has previously worked with Bond “in the field,” instead of the white, slightly
old-maidenish woman of the early Bond movies. There’s just enough there, if you
are willing to suspend your belief, to trace that earlier Sean Connery Bond to
this broken down and likeable Daniel Craig version. Upon viewing this film on
Christmas day, my companion Howard asked, bemusedly, are we supposed to believe
that Eve Moneypenny is Miss Moneypenny’s daughter? If so, I answered, Miss
Moneypenny must have been much more exciting that she appeared on screen, to
secretly have sex, apparently, with a Black man!

The film fortunately does not truly
dwell on this aspect of its continuity of Bond-related events, instead creating
what might be described as almost an alternative universe for the famous spy
hero, establishing Daniel Craig as a very different—if simultaneously related
and similar mythical hero.

As I’ve already suggested, the Craig
version of Bond is not at all diffident, removed, invulnerable, but is a
totally human being about to be abolished, along with his boss. By film’s end,
in case you haven’t seen this movie, M. is killed. The world she represents is
destroyed, while Craig’s Bond has clearly created a new world order. Sure, he
remains a ladies’ man—just like Connery—as suggested in his shower scene with
Sévérine. He wins big at the Macau tables. He drinks endlessly, especially in
the early scenes after he has been presumed dead. But this Bond is a moral
figure, attracted to Sévérine because of his recognition of her dilemma,
disgusted by his own drinking, and slinking back in embarrassment and
self-loathing into M’s home. This Bond is not at all impervious to destruction:
he is shot several times, almost killed, presumed death. In one of the most
powerful scenes of the film, tied up to a chair where the evil Silva almost
undresses him while he fondles the chest wounds that he has inflicted upon him,
the following conversation occurs:

The very
idea that Sean Connery’s Bond (or anyone of his immediate impersonators) might
have responded as Craig does is inconceivable. This is truly a new man, vague
as he remains, in whom we can only be interested. This time round, without any
marvelous new technological weapons and without any of the youthful agility he
might have to support him, he survives to plant a simple but efficient knife in
the back of this marvelous villain.

The makers of this engaging action movie
have also embedded enough clues to future Bond films, asking questions such as
“why Bond’s parents were murdered?” and who, actually, is the new M, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), a former lieutenant
colonel in the British Army, to pique our interest for future manifestations of
the franchise. Even more intriguing to me, is the possibility of once again
encountering Bond’s family’s former gamekeeper, Kincade. It is so wonderful to
see the heavily bewhiskered elderly Albert Finney once more on British soil
that it recalled for me his puckish, slightly pudgy, adorably cute Tom Jones
all over again.

I look forward, for the first time in
decades, to more Bond episodes, with the vulnerable but eternally encased
action hero in his uncreasible silk suit on my local screen. His aging heroics
are quite perfect for our time—an agéd population after all.